Rock and Ice intern "Mississippi" Chris Parker, 27, comes from the Delta and made a deal with the devil. He stands about as tall as a pony keg stacked on an oil drum and rips the blues, singing and picking. He has a black beard and a sharp white canine tooth. It’s the tooth that gives away the hidden temperament—the disposition required to send an absurd, conditions-dependent problem like Super Slopenstein (V8) when it was lofted with wet snow.

In many ways he’s the best intern I’ve worked with. He has a nerdy encyclopedic knowledge of climbing—“Oh yeah, Evgeny, Ouray, 2008, when he hung from his front points at the top of the diving board?”— writes well, churns out good online news and listens attentively to Alison explain hyphenation. He’s respectfully muted in the presence of Andrew’s early-winter low-pressure system with the forecast for snow and blowing snow. He endured my pre-Thanksgiving feast while kids thundered through the room in troupes. Chris arrived late in the season, but caught on quickly to the jive local granite area. He was a great partner, strong and bold.

It seemed like he’d be down for some early-season dry-fooling, a game where you dangle from axes and front points and scratch out a 40-degree, 70-foot conglomerate ceiling called the Man Camp. In winter the Man Camp gets ice at the midpoint and you exit onto long ice daggers, but it’s possible to dry tool anytime. It’s a great place to shake out the winter gear, familiarize yourself with the sharp points and possibly hit yourself in the face with a hammer. I called Mississippi Chris and invited him.

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It was daybreak, late May 1993 and I was climbing the Nose of El Capitan with two strong and lovely ladies, Jeannie and René. We’d just poached a jumar up some lines hanging from Sickle Ledge and we were crouching on the narrow, crescent-shaped feature—the last flat spot before Dolt Tower—sorting our haul bag one more time before blasting off on a four-day ascent. Voices sounded behind me and two men appeared, tethered together with a short bight of rope between them. They were carrying coils in their hands. The one in the lead—a skinny, long-faced, wild-haired man—said, “Excuse me, pardon me, pardon me, excuse me,” in a rapid-fire Manchester accent. He slipped past as neat as a skink sliding into a waterhole and the second man approached. He was big as a bear with a kind face and short, dark, mussed hair. He lifted the left side of his mouth, a signature lopsided smile, and we recognized each other at the same time. It was Craig Luebben.

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I was checking out the latest edition of Summit, the British Mountaineering Council’s quarterly and I came across an article by Doug Scott, the famously tough, knighted British mountaineer who climbed the Southwest Face of Everest in 1975 but is best known for his crawl with two broken legs off Baintha Brakk (AKA the Ogre), a 23,901-foot peak in Pakistan.

In the essay, Scott looks at competition in climbing. Prompted by sport climbing’s possible inclusion in the 2020 Olympics, he starts by running down the history of alpine competition, a subset of the sport with a surprising history of accolades including Olympic medals (20 awarded so far for alpinism) and Piolets d’Or. Scott shows that competition is nothing new, but his thesis really is the question of whether there should be competition in climbing at all.

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Three weeks ago Kirk Meier (the intern) and I divided the drill, bolts, hammer, rope, draws, anchors, water and pretzels and hiked to the Notch. We hung a rope over an 80-foot granite slab called the Red Faction Wall and worked out a series of moves. Most of the holds were copper-smooth slopers, but there were a few gouges in the burnished surface. The bottom looked like the biz. Some small sidepulls ran out at a blank space. The only jugs on the route reappeared after five feet and I scrubbed these rasp-textured incuts with a wire brush. Dirt piled up. I blew the sand out with some aquarium tubing.

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Three weeks ago my wife and I visited the City of Rocks, Idaho, and my son Kai completed his first climb: Lookout Ridge (5.5). He’d just turned four, was on his first road trip, camping and rock scrambling and hanging out with his best friend Hen J. They rallied around the base of the routes with toy trucks, conversing at volume 10, sometimes erupting into hoots and screams until I forcefully explained that screaming is the one vocalization you can not make at a climbing area. I felt bad about subjecting our fellow City of Rocks climbers to Kai, in particular. He projects his voice like an opera star and his lamentations can break eardrums.

The boys tried climbing for the first time about halfway through the trip. We taught them the commands and we talked about how important it is to play quietly so that climbers can hear those commands. Then we talked about using your “climber’s voice,” the one that precludes ape calls and screeches. After that, the boys learned how to tie a figure 8 and I explained the concept of lowering.

Both boys looked stunned so I tried again.“When you’re at the top, just lean back, keep your feet high and walk down."

Kai stepped away from the base and surveyed the anchor, a nest of cams plugged into two cracks about 50 feet up a granite runnel.

“For real?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“In real life?”

“Yes."

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There was a time when I traveled around the U.S. climbing at the hottest new areas and trying the hardest climbs and boulder problems. I met and traded belays with men and women who were pushing the edge of difficulty and I learned a lot from these athletes. Todd Skinner showed me the power of having a great attitude. Lynn Hill put on a technique clinic every time she tied in for a burn. But it was Kurt Smith who demonstrated a law that separated the very good climbers from the best. His maxim was simply: “try.”

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My new climb, The Monster, is a three-pitch granite route at the top of a 250-foot slot canyon exactly 18 minutes from my house. The canyon is so narrow at the start of the route that you can lie down and touch both sides. The left wall leans over the right wall, maybe 10 degrees over vertical. The second pitch is a beauty—steep, pumpy climbing with good trad gear. What’s not to love?

A couple of things.

Though short, the approach is steep and loose, with some random rock fall. Stones kicked free by raven, elk and errant Jack Russell terriers on the rim occasionally zip past your head like bullets. Little rocks, usually. There is a car-sized chockstone wedged up high and if it ever shook loose it would instantly reduce any being in the canyon to a bloody smear. Of course, you’re always under a metaphorical chockstone but there’s nothing like belaying under a real one to remind you of your impending death. Therefore there’s a certain melancholy clinging to existence—wabi sabi—that lends greater beauty to the experience of climbing here. Even so, the possibility of death is a party killer, and reason number one that my new climbing area sucks.

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Early Easter Sunday a knock resounded on the front door and echoed through the house with a boom. I sat up and checked the clock. Four a.m. Outside the rain was dripping off the eaves, filling the darkness with a gloomy music. Who could it be?

I slipped out of bed without waking my wife, padded quietly to the door and opened it a crack. A slender figure dressed in a long black duster and oilskin sou'wester stood in the rain. He leaned forward slightly, shielding a thick sheaf of papers from the downpour and peered at me through brown eyes swirled with jade. His hair was gray as was his beard, which was neatly trimmed and seemed somehow sharp and dangerous. I sniffed the air and caught the faintest odor of brimstone.

“Jefe?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m Baat.”

“Gezundheit.”

“No, really, my name is Baat. I’m a Lesser Infernal Demon, a Bedeviler, district of Sheol.”

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Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

The alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. and I rolled over and stared at the sky trying to remember where I was. Metal bars cut slats through the milky wash of stars. I could just make out big skeletons of wood and metal. A swing-set. A slide. A jungle gym. I was sleeping in a playground tree fort.

Why was I sleeping in a playground?

I sat up in my bag and rubbed my eyes, yawned and flipped on my headlamp. The previous night came back in a rush. Trays of margaritas. People shouting. Tortilla Frisbees. A fuzzy ride back to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area where the guides convened in the playground and discussed the next day.

Oh yeah, I was guiding.

From 1987 to 2005 I supported my climbing addiction through a variety of jobs. Janitor, valet, parking attendant, taxi driver, personal trainer, librarian, dishwasher, furniture mover, university professor, yoga teacher, freelance writer. But my most consistent source of income was as a climbing guide. I had my own company with the absurd appellation Texas Mountain Guides, and also worked as a hired rope gun for various other companies catering to large groups of gumbies like boy scout troops looking for merit badges or Austin-area mega-corporations like Dell that booked climbing classes as team-building exercises.

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Everyone knows that alpinism involves suffering. You walk uphill in atrocious weather carrying heavy packs. The higher you go the harder God closes his hands around your throat. You don’t sleep, food tastes like Pelspan, your brain swells, you cough up chunks and work like an oilfield roustabout. Even if you’ve never swung an ice axe you’re sure to appreciate the misery this special breed endures for the summit. That’s because any account of any climb up a high mountain is loaded with depictions of anguish, death and black digits hanging off appendages like little sizzlers left too long on the barbi.

What climber’s don’t dwell on is the bliss. Sure, people are happy when they arrive at the top and they write about that. But the period of addled summit elation only lasts as long as it takes for you to remember that you still have to find your way down and through the crevasses and back to some sad, stinky little tent and another meal of packing peanuts and cardstock. That’s not the bliss I’m referring to.

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